


to love, or not (can you feel my heart?)

by BatWingsandBlackCats



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Blood and Gore, F/F, Fluff, Hollstein - Freeform, Little bit of angst, hollstein fluff, just a little at the end, slightly nsfw?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 19:52:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4577709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BatWingsandBlackCats/pseuds/BatWingsandBlackCats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maman held out a locket and asked, “Mircalla, darling, do you wish to keep your heart whole, to keep your last shreds of humanity, or do you wish to lock your heart away and become invincible?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	to love, or not (can you feel my heart?)

**Author's Note:**

> This piece is based on this [text post](http://batwingsandblackcats.tumblr.com/post/126681029109/gayasscarmilla-aquastalk-carmillatexts) by the lovely [Carmillatexts](http://carmillas.co.vu/) over on tumblr. I was originally going to work on some pure angst tonight, but I saw the text post and couldn't resist the fluff opportunities. And I figured we could all use a bit of an angst break.
> 
> This doesn't follow any kind of season two canon timeline other than it being set in the Dean's apartment, but it does involve canon details. 
> 
> The second half of the title is inspired by the Bring Me The Horizon song [Can You Feel My Heart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNbZJ-IgAEg)
> 
> Comments and critiques are always welcome and much appreciated, and kudos are always greatly appreciated :)  
> thanks for reading, and I hope you like it!  
> apologies if there are any spelling/grammar mistakes

On her one hundred and eighteenth birthday, Mircalla Karnstein was given a choice. 

Maman held out a locket and asked, “Mircalla, darling, do you wish to keep your heart whole, to keep your last shreds of humanity, or do you wish to lock your heart away and become invincible?”

Mircalla, still so very young for her kind, looked to her sister with nervous eyes, who nodded towards her with the slightest smile. _Make your choice,_ her eyes said. 

“I...I choose to keep my heart beneath my breast,”

Mattie closed her eyes and sighed, her smile falling. She’d been so sure that her sister would follow in her footsteps.

“What was that?” Maman asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I wish to keep my heart beneath my breast,” She said, her voice steadier, more sure. 

“Are you most certain that this is what you want?” Maman asked, holding the locket closer to Mircalla, temptingly swinging the chain it hung from. 

Mircalla’s eyes flicked down to the locket, but then she looked up again at Maman, and nodded. “It is,”

 

\-----

 

“What were you _thinking?_ ” Mattie hissed, grabbing Mircalla by the arm. She’d followed her sister out of Maman’s manor and into the November night air.

Mircalla turned around, pulling away from her sister, hurt in her deep brown eyes. Mattie didn’t often talk to her this way. “I made my choice, Mattie. I feel that I must keep my heart whole...I want to keep it whole,”

Mattie huffed a growl. “Do you not understand that if one of the marks discovers what you are, a stake to your bosom will end you?” She said, jabbing a finger hard above Mircalla’s heart. 

_“I understand,”_ Mircalla gritted out, “but my answer remains. I wish to keep some form of humanity, even if I have lost the human I once was,”

Mattie shook her head, a humorless laugh forced out between full, red stained lips. “You are a _child,”_ she growled, “and you understand _nothing.”_

Mircalla didn’t see Mattie for a decade after that.

 

\-----

 

Centuries passed, and Maman asked again, this time, the year being 2014, not 1798. Invincibility, or her last bit of humanity. 

Carmilla spent months weighing her options. 

 

Her heart was so heavy. So, so achingly heavy that it felt like if she weren’t careful, it would just tear through her flesh and fall away, her heart so stained with blood, by time. She had killed so many, spent so many years in that coffin, punished so harshly for love. Sometimes she wished it _would_ fall away.

_Stone cannot love flesh._

Oh, but how had she loved flesh. When she had met Ell, she had been euphoric, thanking her past self for not choosing to lock away her heart. Ell had been all delicate hands and fine hair and the scent of wildflowers and summer haze, blue eyes as turquoise as the waters of the Mediterranean. Ell had been soft whispers and chase brushings of hands in the night as they talked of books and all the places Mircalla hand been, and all the places Ell wished she could go. Ell had tasted of wild plums the first time they kissed. 

Those lips tasting of plumbs had broken into the most beautiful smile when Mircalla had asked her to run away. 

But it had been short lived. 

So horribly short lived. 

That euphoria had been violently ripped from her when Maman had met her that night instead of Ell. It had been ripped away from her when those beautiful turquoise eyes looked at her with terror and disgust, and not the affection that they had once held. 

The first few weeks she spent in the coffin were filled with screams of how she wished she’d never had a heart, of how she wished Maman would have cut the entire bloodied and battered and barely beating organ out of her chest instead of only offering to take a little piece, and listening when she refused. She screamed until she lost her voice, _cut it out cut it out cut it out **I don’t want it anymore**_.

When the bombs broke her out of her bloody tomb, she fed on every soldier whether dead or breathing that she could wrap her cold and trembling fingers around, sobbing as she sank her teeth into their necks, reveling in the taste of fresh blood after so so so many years of thick, congealed, stinking rotten blood. 

She felt the last of her humanity drain away on that battle field like the blood out of the necks of those soldiers and when she saw the thousands of bodies that lay upon the blood soaked earth and the whirring and roaring beasts in the air and the gunshots and the screams of the dying and the severed limbs, she lost faith in her own humanity and the humanity of the human race.

Or so she thought. 

Every twenty years, she chased away as many young women from Silas as she could. There was the added entertainment of annoying Maman but she saw Ell in every pair of eyes and she couldn’t bear the thought of them being sacrificed the same way. Maman always took more, but Carmilla always saved as many as she could.

She may have fallen out of love with Ell somewhere down the line but when she closed her eyes at dawn she saw those disgusted and terrified and betrayed turquoise eyes and the word _monster_ reverberated around her skull in Ell’s fear stricken voice. She may have fallen out of love with her but that didn’t mean that her still whole yet however battered and bloodied heart didn’t clench whenever she thought of her, or saw a flash of turquoise, looking betrayed and hurt, or caught the scent of plumbs and wildflowers. 

Maybe, she thought, her humanity was hanging on by a few threads. 

Maybe those threads were worth keeping.

Once again, she told Maman _no._

She hadn’t expected her decision to be rewarded so quickly. 

But _Laura._

Laura is excitable, kinetic energy, fierce passion and determination and unabashed love and loyalty and recklessness and so god damn selfless. She is sun streaked brown hair and the scent of lavender and leather and sage and she is gentle but not delicate hands for her hands are strong and capable. She is scrunched up features and her eyes are candle flames in the dark and she is warmth, she is soft words and inarticulate ranting and raving and conversations about the stars and she is a guarded heart though her eyes are not and she is the most beautiful chaos Carmilla has ever laid her eyes on.

That euphoria built up in her once again but she tamped it down, unable to withstand that euphoria being ripped away again. 

It broke through anyway.

But suddenly Carmilla is waking up on Laura’s bed with the taste of blood and ash in her mouth and Maman is dead and that euphoria is exploding inside of her because Laura’s lips are on her own and Maman will _never_ take her away. 

Laura’s lips taste of chocolate and nutmeg. 

 

\------

 

Carmilla and Laura were sitting in bed, the sheets pooled around their naked bodies. Candles bathed the room in soft, flickering light, the white gauze that surrounds the bed blowing slightly in the wind. Laura had her head in the crook of Carmilla’s neck, gently sucking at and kissing her warm skin, her hand tracing aimlessly across her stomach. She sighed contentedly as Carmilla began running a hand through her hair.

“I love when you do that...” Laura breathed into her skin, kissing behind the vampire’s ear. 

“Yeah?” Carmilla murmured, completely lost in this little human.

“Mhmm,” Laura pulled away, and tucked a stray curl behind Carmilla’s ear. She smiled softly.   
Carmilla stared at her with unguarded adoration, star-filled eyes gazing into candle flames. Laura’s messy sun streaked hair fell around her shoulders in waves, half covering small, beautiful breasts, those candle flame eyes lidded and drowsy, but content. Happy. Those gentle yet strong, warm hands caressing her skin, her lavender and leather and sage engulfing Carmilla. 

“What?” Laura whispered, smiling. 

Carmilla smiled, looking down for a moment and shaking her head slightly. “I’m just grateful for a decision I made a long time ago,” She said, her voice low and gravelly with pleasant exhaustion. 

“What was it?” Laura asked, curious. She continued running her finger over Carmilla’s stomach, and gently nudged Carmilla’s forehead with her own.

Carmilla bit her lip a little before she spoke. “Mattie...under her shirt she wears a locket, and in it she keeps a piece of her heart. It’s what makes her impossible to kill.” Laura looked confused, but remained quiet. “On my hundred and eighteenth birthday, I was offered the same choice by Maman. Trade my humanity for invincibility. Maman offered it again last year, before we met. I didn’t take it either time,”

“Why didn’t you?” Laura asked, “Wouldn't it keep you safe? Wouldn’t that be the point?”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t be able to love...Mattie can love, but she can’t be _in_ love. Her humanity is gone,” Carmilla explained, “I...I couldn’t give that up. Even after Ell, and the coffin, and the sacrifice, the war...sometimes I wished that Maman had cut it out entirely, but...in the end, I couldn’t bear to give it up,” She took Laura’s hand and placed it between her breasts, over her heart. “Can you feel it?”

Laura nodded, feeling the gentle flutter of Carmilla’s dimly beating heart beneath her pale skin. It still beat, though weaker than a human heart. She stroked Carmilla’s smooth skin with her thumb, pressing her forehead to the vampire’s.

“It needed to be whole for _you_ ,” Carmilla whispered, “ _you_ , and no one else,”


End file.
